Music

Classical Music

Any cultural tradition that endures and flourishes for a thousand years must move at a considered pace. Thus it was that a mere five years late, in 2005 classical music entered the 21st century. The move, when it came, was not heralded by a revolution in sound—as with the new music of Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg at the turn of the previous century—as much as a new sensibility, one that opened the doors to fresh ideas and realities.

In June the BBC offered free downloads of Beethoven’s nine symphonies on the Internet. The performances, by conductor Gianandrea Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic, were drawn from the network’s The Beethoven Experience series. Initially the offer was made as an experiment to gauge interest in the music on the part of the public. By the end of the month, the experiment had turned into a phenomenon; listeners downloaded the music 1.4 million times in two one-week periods (Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony proved to be the most popular, drawing 220,461 downloads). The immensity of the response—comparable to that of hit recordings by pop music artists—attested to the enduring popularity of classical music. In a more tangible sense, however, it offered the flagging classical music industry new insights and business models for making the product available to the public via the distribution of “virtual” classical recordings that could expand the form’s accessibility and commercial viability.

Classical music also combined with the digital realm in February when the world’s largest music publisher, London-based Boosey & Hawkes, concluded a deal with the Music Solution, London, in which the former made available the rights to themes from 300 popular classical music pieces, including “Russian Dance” from Stravinsky’s Petrushka and Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” for use as ringtones on cellular phones.

The classical world flirted with another pop culture phenomenon in the form of the “Dear Friends” concert tour, which traversed the U.S. during the year. The program featured music by Japanese composer Nobuo Uematsu from the immensely popular video game series Final Fantasy. The tour suggested yet another way in which the classical world could reach out to younger listeners, many of whom had inadvertently been introduced to classical music via the sound tracks to the games.

In a more traditional sense, composers and orchestras continued their public outreach efforts by launching their own labels. Following the lead of the London Symphony Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony, the London Philharmonic Orchestra founded its own record label and in April issued its initial releases, which included two archive recordings and two recent live performances of works by Dmitry Shostakovich and Sergey Rachmaninoff. Released from a contract with Deutsche Grammophon, which had undertaken to fund his project of recording all of Johann Sebastian Bach’s sacred cantatas, conductor John Eliot Gardiner started his own label, Soli Deo Gloria, which issued its first recordings during the year. Meanwhile, two British composers were taking matters into their own hands. Michael Nyman (best known for film scores such as that for The Piano [1993]) and the venerable Scottish iconoclast Peter Maxwell Davies also formed their own respective record labels. “My motivation is pure greed,” Nyman assured The Guardian newspaper, “but it’s a greed to get as much of my music as possible out there for the public to sample.”

Even when technology and business innovations were not involved, change was in the air. Finally entering the 20th century—albeit in the 21st—the classical world was rocked when Marin Alsop was named music director of the Baltimore Symphony. She thus became the first woman to attain such a post at a major American orchestra.

Space—and a galaxy far, far away—figured in two new musical works that made their debuts in 2005. In June conductor Erich Kunzel’s adaptation of composer John Williams’s score for the six Star Wars films was presented by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Also in June the British Institute of Physics paid tribute to physicist Albert Einstein with its Heavenly Music workshop event at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, in which the recorded sounds of stars, planets, and galaxies were mixed into a celestial musical work. (See Physical Sciences: Special Report.)

On CD and DVD, classical music celebrated the new and old. The January 2000 world premiere of English composer John Tavener’s choral work Fall and Resurrection was released on an Opus Arte DVD, while up-and-coming Danish virtuoso Nikolaj Znaider was highlighted in performances of the Beethoven and Mendelssohn violin concertos. The independent Bridge label began to release a series of historic recordings of performances at the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress, which marked its 80th anniversary in 2005. On a similar note, officials of Germany’s Bayreuth Festival released a 13-CD set of the 1956 staging of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, featuring Hans Hotter in the role of Wotan and Astrid Varnay as Brünnhilde. The digital clarity of DVDs came to the assistance of two French baroque operas, highlighting the visuals and dancing that were as important to that form as the music itself. Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Persée (EuroArts) was captured in a production by Hervé Niquet and the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Choir, while Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Indes galantes (Opus Arte) was given a fanciful reading by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants. Herbert Henck demonstrated the delicate, surprisingly melodic side of the young John Cage on piano pieces that included “The Seasons” and “Metamorphosis” on an ECM New Series CD. Alsop and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra provided a look at Kurt Weill—before he was seduced by the musical theatre—on performances of his first and second symphonies on the Naxos label. Arguably one of the most intriguing recordings of the year was The Five Browns (RCA), which showcased five siblings performing energetic and vivacious five-piano adaptations of such warhorses as Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Flight of the Bumblebee and Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Older works were given a rebirth during the year. A fragment from a previously unheard piano concerto by Beethoven was given its premiere in The Netherlands in February by pianist Ronald Brautigam and the Rotterdam Chamber Orchestra. Two works by Antonio Vivaldi were given their modern premieres; a concert version of the Italian Baroque master’s opera Motezuma was presented in Rotterdam in June, and a full production was staged in Düsseldorf, Ger., in September, its first performances since 1733. An aria, “De torrente in via bibet,” recently reattributed to Vivaldi, was performed in Melbourne in August. A manuscript of a “ritornello aria” by J.S. Bach was found in the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, Ger., in May; it was the first discovery of a previously unknown vocal work by Bach since 1935. At year’s end music scholars at Vienna’s Musikverein were attempting to authenticate a manuscript that bore the name of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

A host of new operas appeared during the year, two of which illustrated the ways in which the worlds of classical and pop music were merging. In October the Royal Danish Opera presented the world premiere of a 10-song cycle from pop songwriter Elvis Costello’s opera-in-progress, The Secret Arias, based on the unrequited love of Danish author Hans Christian Andersen for Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. In September Roger Waters, formerly of the psychedelic rock group Pink Floyd, unveiled his first opera, Ça Ira, on CD and DVD. Electronics composer Charles Wuorinen delved deeply into his 12-tone abstractions in his opera Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which received its premiere at the New York City Opera late in 2004. James Fenton’s libretto was based on the book by Salman Rushdie. Also in New York, composer Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy was given its debut by the Metropolitan Opera. Philip Glass’s Waiting for the Barbarians debuted in Erfurt, Ger., in September. The two-and-a-half-hour work was based on South African writer J.M. Coetzee’s book about the evils of state-sponsored repression. In October, two months after the 60th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, John Adams’s Doctor Atomic was presented by the San Francisco Opera. The work was based on the efforts of a team of scientists led by J. Robert Oppenheimer that led to the detonation of the atomic bomb in 1945. The Glass and Adams works were acclaimed by critics and the public, but other new operas—and new productions of older operas—did not fare as well. Conductor Lorin Maazel’s operatic version of George Orwell’s novel 1984 was lambasted by critics following its debut at London’s Royal Opera, and in August the British premiere of Adams’s 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer created a furor over its staging, in which members of the Scottish Opera stormed the stage from the audience as terrorists with mock machine guns.

Some new stagings of Wagner operas created controversies as well. German film producer and director Bernd Eichinger came under critical fire in March for his depiction in a production at Berlin’s Staatsoper of the knights in Parsifal as punk rockers. At Bayreuth, Swiss director Christoph Marthaler’s new staging of Tristan und Isolde was booed during its unveiling in July, and the English National Opera raised the ire of critics and public with its version of Götterdämmerung, which called for Brünnhilde to strap on a bomb and blow up herself and the cast in a simulated suicide attack.

All those controversies paled in comparison to the exit of longtime music director Riccardo Muti from Milan’s fabled La Scala. Muti, who had led the company for 19 years, was accused by his staff and musicians of running La Scala like a fiefdom. The dispute ended acrimoniously in April, when Muti resigned, citing irreconcilable differences. One of opera’s most generous and ostentatious benefactors, the Cuban-American investor Alberto Vilar, suffered a similarly operatic downfall. Vilar, who had donated millions of dollars to various major opera companies, was arrested in May and charged with having defrauded a business client of $5 million. Oboist Blair Tindall raised eyebrows with her book Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music when it was published in June; the tell-all tome recounted alleged cases of orchestral in-fighting and substance abuse by classical musicians. Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel lowered brows when in January, after suddenly losing his voice, he mimed a portrayal of Wotan at London’s Covent Garden while another singer sang the role.

The classical world was amazed and mystified during much of the year by the appearance of the so-called Piano Man, who was found wandering on a beach in Kent, Eng., in April and reportedly stunned mental health workers by giving virtuoso performances of classical music on a piano. Months later he was finally identified as 20-year-old Andreas Grassl from the German village of Prosdorf. Neither a satisfactory explanation of the circumstances of his appearance nor the particulars of his care under British health authorities were forthcoming.

Recipients of top musical awards in 2005 included French composer Henri Dutilleux, who was honoured with the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. The Pulitzer Prize for Music went to Steven Stucky’s Second Concerto for Orchestra, while the Grammy Award for best classical recording was given to John Adams for On the Transmigration of Souls (2002), his large-scale work commemorating the victims of the 9/11 terrorist bombings in New York City.

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